Wonderwall wrote:Still a possible 81 points left....... crisis, what crisis?
to be fair that is true tho your sarcasm is duly noted.
But let's just say if their tides turned, in a snap of the fingers, what would it mean for their season? Let's find out.
Chelsea under probably 5 different managers, maybe even 6, over the last 7 full seasons have achieved 2.06 pts/match on average.
They have a team that's arguably easily as good or better than those teams during this era.
27 * 2.06 == would give them roughly 66 pts. (i have not attempted anything as sophisticated as their Home v Away records, with the assumption that al things being equal they've got roughly the same number of each left at this point of the season vs any other particular season average.)
A quick scan of the the last decade of 4th place finishes shows us that never has 66 achieved 4th place (67 did once), but would have put a team 5th (roughly 65%) or 6th (35%).
I'd say that it's fairly reasonable to assume that unless Chelsea can overachieve and get rapidly back to form which earned them more like 2.28 pts/match last season instead of their average over the last decade (or arguably their current run of form, but let's just pretend they'll get back to "Average Chelsea" at some point), then their chances of fourth are virtually nonexistent. Even with an increase to their haul last season, this could be one of those seasons which the low 70s is required to get into 4th place. Which would mean that a sudden return to form like last season would still make it a very serious dogfight as the best guess would be about 72 pts for Chelsea.
With that perspective, if you were Roman and you were /nearly/ guaranteed not to finish Top 4 would you sack Jose right now and take the chance of getting a bump from a new gaffer which puts your points/match haul at closer to your average last season (2.28/match). Roman doesn't need Top 4 to spend and could miss a year for sure. But he's a prideful, arrogant, tinkering fuck. What would it do to his ego and the headlines all summer, etc?
The team and squad have gone to shit for some reason. Only the manager can be at fault as far as any of us can tell.
cheers